The 8 Game Experiment

I sit here pondering to myself about the games that I play. Early on in this journey I wrote a post when I realised that no limit hold 'em wasn't the "be all and end all" of poker. I find that no limit hold em is the hardest game to profit from for me. I think that because so many people are clued up on the basic and intermediate skills required to play it, it gives me, or any reasonably intelligent poker player less of an edge.

People know the odds of hitting their flush draws. They know that raising 3 times the blinds pre flop from an early position means that I have a good hand. And they know not to hold on to their ace – rag after they miss the flop if someone is betting into them.

These basic skills that every poker player has seem to be missing in other games though.

I have noticed that in low ball games like razz, deuce to seven triple draw etc, people make silly mistakes that pay me off. They make errors that you don’t really see in hold ‘em. In Omaha high / low, people will fight each other in a multi-way pot for the high end, allowing me to easily collect the low end half of the pot. I feel that I want to explore other games properly, instead of just playing a stud tournament here and there, or a razz cash game every now and then.

I have decided that it is time for an experiment.

In the 2008 World Series a new tournament was launched. It was structured the same as any other poker tournament, but every time the blinds went up, the game changed. It was like an extended HORSE game, but there was eight games played in rotation, so the tournament was imaginatively called “8 game”!

Pokerstars run “8 game” sit n go’s and tournaments which I have played. I satellited into the WCCOP 8 game tournament last year and although I think I did well, I didn’t cash. They also do cash games using the same format which will provide the perfect arena for this experiment.

I will play the small stake 8 game tables for 100 rounds. Each round consists of 6 hands of each game. This will be a total of 600 hands for each game. I have designed a simple spreadsheet to track my performance in each game. The object of this experiment is to find out which game I am best at, and which gives me the most money.

I will update soon with some results after I have played for a while.

Home Game Results

Well the results from the home game we mixed financially, but I think I achieved what I wanted to do. I wanted to read players that I have played against a lot now. I wanted to use the knowledge I have gained by playing against these people to play them all individually. This is a skill that a poker player needs to learn to do by instinct.

First of all, the financial result:
I had a great start. I was playing tight aggressive. I have a really good read on one certain player who always likes to play very aggressively against me. He's a good friend of mine, but likes to put me on the spot when we play poker. This is a good thing because I can wait until I have a good hand before I choose to put my chips in with him. I know he will play me in big hands because he just likes to try to knock me out of tournaments. This is probably the most useful tool I had all night.

Another player that I play against a lot will play his draws strictly to the pot odds. I remember a particular hand early when I raised the blinds and when the flop came down we both missed it. I was out of position so I checked the flop and so did he. The turn came down to give two hearts on the board. I raised enough to make sure that the pot odds weren’t worth a call for the flush. He sat there, worked it out, and then folded. I could almost see the cogs turning in his brain.

The night started well with a few good results. I think with two payouts I just try to get to heads up. I have found out that I'm good at negotiating a chop if i want one. As the night went on I got tired. Some people can play tired, almost automatically. Then again, some people can play drunk. I can't. Not only did the results start going the other way but so did the way i was playing. I wish I stopped when I knew I was getting tired.

I think that the lessons that I tried to learn about reading players that I play regularly was over shadowed by another lesson. Don't play tired.

Home Game Test

Tonight will be a great test in reading players tonight as I have been invited to play in a home game involving 5 other players that I have played a lot against. I am hoping to use the knowledge that I have of the individual players tonight to give myself a new years bankroll boost.

The format will be "a few sit n go's", meaning that we will play a couple of mini tournaments, probably at a £10 or £15 buy in. The interesting part about tonight is that I won't be using a normal stratagy, am going to use everything that I know about the players to play them and not the cards.

I'll post my results and how I got on in the morning.

Learned To Run But Need To Remind Myself How To Walk

There is a bar near me, that every Sunday evening holds a game of no limit hold 'em. It's a small stakes shootout tournament, five pounds (about $7.25) which attracts a few good players that I know, but is filled mainly by people that don't know how to play. They know the hand rankings, and they know how to go all in, but that's it.

I see this game as a good bit of practice for basic 101 tournament poker. I struggled with this game for a while, as I couldn't make people fold their bottom pair on the flop, and I couldn't price them out on their draws. I think last year that although this is the easiest game I probably will ever play, I still lost money from the ten or so games that I played.

The thought came to me the other day exactly how to play this game. If people don't know how to play then there is no point trying fancy moves against them.

This Sunday I noticed that none of them would throw away an ace. I remember someone calling a raise pre-flop on a hand I wasn't involved with. The flop came down as three suited connectors so there was straight possibilities as well as a flush on, but the gentleman kept calling reasonably high bets. At the showdown he turned over his Ace 9 and thought he was in good shape (he paired his ace on the river) but the other player had a straight which he hit on the flop. I noticed people holding on with their aces or small pocket pairs all night.

Normally with a dangerous board I bet out at it. Or if I sense weakness I'll bet because a reasonably good player will fold to a bet if they miss the flop completely. They would look at the board and know what roughly the odds of hitting a good hand on the turn or the river are and play accordingly. A bad player doesn't though and that's the point I am making. I have to play bad players completely differently.

I need to tighten up my starting range against a bad player that will call all the way down to the river with a draw or small pair. I need to assume before I even call or raise the blinds, that we are going all the way no matter what cards come down. I need to play the board and the cards more with this type of player, and most importantly I need to stop trying to out play someone who can't be pushed off the pot.

I want to win this Sunday night tournaments regularly because, well, I should be winning them. I have a massive edge over these players. But I also have a very keen interest in getting back to learning basic poker, because I am told that at most events at the World Series, the tables are full of players like this.

I'll employ my basic 101 tournament poker strategy at this weekly game and report back to you.

My Poker Goals for 2009

I have come a long way in 2008 as my previous post explains and I'm happy with the way we are moving. I want to lay out a few of my goals for 2009:

• Employ proper bankroll management - This is something that I'm very slack at keeping on top of. I am going to use the spreadsheet to track every single game that I play, with no exceptions. It can be very hard to find live games in my local area so sometimes it's a case of playing in whatever I can find, but I'm going to play strictly to my bankroll in 2009.
• Improve my cash game -I think it will only take a month or so of solid concentration and studying to find out and resolve why my cash game results are so up and down. The new year is going to represent a new era in terms of cash games for me.
• Play a professional circuit tournament - I will, at some point in 2009, play in a world class tournament. I just want a taste of things to come and some experience at the top level. I think it will either be the EPT in London next October, or the WSOP Europe.
• Blog more - No more lay-offs for months at a time. It helps me when I write this blog.

So that's it, the plan of action for 2009. Happy new year everyone, where ever you are.

2008 In Review

It's time for The Future Poker Star to look back at 2008, and ask if we are on track.

First of all I apologize to readers, and to myself, for not keeping on top of this blog. I found it hard to write witty intelligent 300 word explanations of games so I neglected to keep it up to date. I know it would have been better to just write results than to write nothing. So now, after a bit of house keeping and spam deleting, I'm back.

If I look back to this time last year, I think I would be very happy and surprised to know that by the end of 2008 I am as far along the road as I am. For starters, I have been crushing the weekly local tournament. By about October I have been pretty much unbeatable there. In fact in the last 6 games before Christmas, I won 5 of them and came 2nd in the other. I have learned how to play every regular player there exactly as they need to be played which is very important. I know that to lose I have to get unlucky.

I still feel that I am best suited to tournaments as the other players that I play against don’t seem to understand the basics of tournament play. I have lost count of the times that I have heard someone say “I had to call his all in with my 7-3 off suit; he’s such a short stack”. This to me is just crazy but the players there seem to think this is how to play tournament poker. It’s not there fault, but nobody seems to understand what the end game is, that they have to be there at the end. It seems as though everyone just wants to bulldoze over each other. I find that a very tight hand selection coupled with the knowledge of what each player plays and how he plays it is the way to go.

I have started to play another tournament too. Again it is a weekly local game but it is with a completely different group of players. I get crushed here. It’s a very low buy-in (£5.00) which I think attracts bad play. It is like being the best dancer in a dancing competition in a mine field. It’s just who is the luckiest. Players don’t like to play me post flop, so they stick it all in with rubbish. I should be making a profit from these games, but they turn it into a coin flipping contest. I should really set aside some time to study a strategy for this game, because out trying to out play them just isn’t going to cut it.

A negative from my tournament play for 2008 though is that I haven’t expanded. I’m still in the same town playing the same players in the same games. I haven’t gone further afield and branched out. This is down to a few reasons but really I think I may just be stuck in my comfort zone.

Cash games this year have been a different story.

Every cash game I am in I struggle with. I can never seem to get a rhythm going. I find it hard to get money out of people in cash games. I think it is because I play so tight that people aren’t going to give me action when I want it. I would be surprised it I have even turned a profit in cash games in 2008.

All in all, I feel that I am a much better player than I was this time last year. My poker theory is worlds apart, mainly because of all the time I put into it. Every time I have a spare minute, I put the iPod in, preloaded with poker instructional mp3’s and podcasts. I read poker books constantly, and I’m always scouring the net. The more I read, the more I want.

Also my reading skills are a lot better. It is starting to come as an instinct. Just a simple process of elimination and I know pretty the range of cards someone is playing, which is improving all the time.

Oh yeah, I was on the same table as Chris Moneymaker and Daniel Negreanu in a Pokerstars tournament at one point too which satisfied the geek in me.

Happy New Years everyone, now let’s shuffle up and deal!

Tournament Take Down.

After five long, hard attempts at the weekly local tournament, I finally managed to take it down this week.

This weekly game represented the "next step up" on the ladder to me and it has given me a real sense of achievement. The reason for this is because I know that one or two months ago I didn't have the skill, knowledge, experience, or confidence to win it. I didn't luck my way to winning.... I learned how it win it.

The first thing to note about this tournament is that minutes before I arrived at the venue I had one of those random confrontations that comes your way every now and then that really tests you. It had me worked up and a few years ago I would have let my aggression get the better of me, but by the time I sat down I already knew that I had to chill out or I wouldn't last long. I almost sat out, let my heart rate reduce to normal, and gave it time for my body temperature to return to normal. I knew not to let personal things come to the table, so I sat back and let them all play while I folded until my mind was really on the game.

For the first hour or so, I played tight and just played the top hands as per usual, but I also played the suited connectors as best to Doyle Brunsons instructions in Super System as possible. I am finding these cards to be very profitable in a very different way than the traditional top hands and I feel that every hold 'em player should read what he has to say about them.

There was only 21 players but they all wanted to win it within the first few orbits of the table. It seemed that they turned up to double up or go home. Nobody wanted to just grind it out adding to their stack bit by bit. It is something that I have noticed at all live poker games that I have played. You can almost smell that certain players at times feel the urge to push all-in no matter what their cards are.

I got to the final table without much drama.

When we got there I had pretty much the same amount of chips that I started with. I had been here before and knew where I went wrong. In the past when I was short stacked I was waiting for the big hands and hoping to double up. This time I decided that I would get a read of the players and raise them out of the blinds when I thought they were week. It really didn't matter what i had, it only mattered what I thought they had. As long as I had position on them, and I thought they were week, I would really go for them and not give an inch until they folded.

I managed to slug it out and work my way into a pretty good chip stack by the time we were at the bubble. This is the time when I think I played very badly. I was playing super tight and was scared to do anything. This was stupid because to me, poker isn't about the money, it's about becoming the best poker player I can be. With that said though I became the turtle that retreated in it's shell when everything I read tells me to do the opposite and attack every bit of weakness at the table.

We got past the bubble and I played good solid poker, but this week I was playing it aggressively. I made sure that I was the player at the table that they all had to beat and they all took shots at me. This is what I wanted. I wanted players to be firing bullets at me. the further into the game we went, the more confident I was becoming. I was going through a "rush" of cards when three players went out quickly.

We were heads up for the first time, and I had a massive chip lead. I must have had three or four times more than my opponent and it was only a few hands before he went all in with a Queen and a King to my Ace King. The community cards came to create on of the most uneventful hands on my journey so far (my Ace high to his King high), but as the river hit, I knew that I had achieved something.

I now have complete and utter confidence in what I am trying to prove, that being a winning poker player is all about studying and practising as much as you can. It was just a small tournament in the grand scale of things to come, but it was a huge step for me.

I am going to continue to play in the same weekly game with the same dedication and concentration, but I am going to look for another game somewhere, another tournament with higher stakes and hopefully a higher skill level. I want to be able to keep going along the steep learning curve and adjust to a higher game.

But for tonight at least, I want to feel happy with myself and the people that have helped me. Not for winning a few hundred pounds, but for finding out that I can really do this, not with some set of skills that I was born with, but by dedication to learning how to become The Future Poker Star.

I have updated the latest statistic page and it has made a big difference.

Quick Super System Notes

I received Doyle Brunson's Super System in the post the other day and decided to give you some quick thoughts on it so far.

I read the introductions and skipped to the no-limit hold 'em section, so this is by no means an in-depth review but more my initial thoughts on it.

For those who don't know, Super System is known as the bible of poker books and has been selling well for years. By the time Brunson had written the book he had already won millions in poker and had won the World series Of Poker (then known as the Poker World Championship) twice.

When it comes to poker, he knows his stuff.

After a read though the specified sections I took two things away straight away which will defiantly improve my play.

The first one is that the way that he plays hold 'em is aggression, aggression, aggression! One particular quote that I took from the book is this:

"If your going to call, then bet."

By that he means that if you aren't on the button, and you would call say 100 chips, then instead of checking and waiting for an opponent to bet, then bet the 100 chips yourself. This may sound simple to some readers but it opened my eyes to another major flaw in my game. I really check sometimes knowing that I would call a bet that may come may way. Doyle explained that I should bet in those situations.

The other thing that I picked up straight away is the value of mid sized connecting cards. By this I mean 6-7 suited, 7-8 suited, 8-9 suited etc. He writes a huge chapter on it which I am currently absorbing. I hope that I don't do his millions of hands of experience an injustice by explaining the power of these cards in a few sentences.

Basically if you raise pre-flop with these hands then most poker players will throw away cards other than picture cards, like aces, or kinds, or queens etc. If you have four players in the hand with picture cards and you hit your straight with your mid-sized connectors then you know you will have the best hand and the chances are if they have a big pair then you can get a lot of money from them.

It's like making sure that everyone is beating themselves up and fighting to make their way to the front door, you can wipe them all out by quietly sneaking out the back. You are setting them up perfectly for a fall.

Again, I have just read a few sections and I can't say I properly studied them. These are just my initial thoughts and observations on a huge course on poker. However, I used these tactics at a local tournament on Tuesday this week and finished higher than I ever had done before.

Back To The Drawing Board

I have just come back from the regular Tuesday evening local tournament with a revelation.

Over the past month or so I have been completely humbled in just about every game that I have played and it has to go down as more than just being on tilt. I can't seem to get any good cards and if I do, I seem to get beat by weaker starting hands.

I guess this is luck, or the lack of it.

But what i am really starting to worry about is the fact that I am starting to play crap. I back down to re-raises every time, I am not concentrating on other players reactions or betting patterns, and I'm not being aggressive at all unless I happen to flop the nuts.

The fact of the matter is that I need to get back to basics. I need to get back to where I started going wrong and take it from there. I have to go back to the times when I was winning by being the best player at the table.

I have ordered Doyle Brunson's book "Super System" and I am going to read and re-read it before I play one more hand. I'm going to use the next few weeks getting back into my winning ways by learning more than I have done before and I simply must get back to playing smart poker so I can play my way out of this bad patch and continue towards our goal of becoming The Future Poker Star.

Facebook Page

After fighting the Facebook revolution for years now, The Future Poker Star has been added. The reason we didn't have one before is because for some reason I just couldn't figure it out. Luckily, Olly sorted it all out and did a fantastic job with it.

On our profile are some really useful tools including videos, a hand rank calculator, a bankroll management application and some poker lessons. If you are one of the 43 million people on Facebook then go ahead and add yourself to our page by clicking the link below or the button on the side bar.

Facebook Page

Once again, thank you very much to Olly who gave his time and patience to it.